Pages

Sunday, September 13, 2015

“It’s the fifteenth Sunday after Trinity,” I say to Lady,
brilliancing by her absence (sorry, gotta be Puerto Rican to get that), and
however stupid it may be to say it, does it matter? She loves me, she’s one of
three sisters I’ve picked up along the way, and anyway she’s not here, so it
doesn’t really matter.

“Of course I’m here, and what’s the deal with the fifteenth
Sunday after Trinity?

“I’m still trying to figure that out, since I wasn’t raised
Catholic or Lutheran but a sort of Presbyterian, except that it was the
Midwestern version, which meant that the hearty, slightly sour rye bread and
beer got tamed down to Wonder Bread and milk.”

“Marc?”

“Oh you know, John Knox, who cooked up the whole thing, was
a merry Scottish soul who decided that we had no free will, couldn’t do a damn
thing on our own, that it had all been written down for us, every last action
we take. So bingo, we’re just chess
pieces being moved by the celestial hand. Oh, and get ready, because about 99%
of us are foreordained to go to Hell, and there’s nothing we can do about it,
since instead of having life coaches, we have life tracks, which we can’t get
off of.”

“Hah! I was going to have a Perrier, but now I’m going to
have a beer. See! I fixed that!”

“An excellent idea, especially since it’s the fifteenth
Sunday after Trinity, though still before noon, but sorry, God ordained that
you would change your mind about that too.”

“So now I’ll have the Perrier!”

“That too was written.”

“Dammit, Marc, somehow this feels like all those arguments
with my brothers, when I was a kid, that deteriorated down to ‘did not / did
too, did not / did too.’ Really, what sort of a God would do this? Put us all
on the conveyor belt for seventy years and then throw us into Hell for all
time? That’s crazy!”

“Is it any crazier
than saying that God loves us all, and that Hell is merely the absence of God’s
presence in our lives here on earth, and that we’ll all go to Heaven after
death? At least, I presume we will, because we’ve abolished Hell, and nobody is
certain about purgatory or limbo, or whatever we’re now not calling it. So that
means I’ll be stuck up there with Hitler out there mowing his cloud every
Saturday morning as I’m nursing my hangover, the next cloud over. Won’t that be
nice?”

“Hitler is not in Heaven, Marc!”

“So where is he?”

“I don’t know, but not in Heaven,” said Lady, shifting to
poetic certainty from Aristotelian logic. “Anyway, why are you cooking up this
religion, and what’s the fifteenth Sunday after whatever-it-was got to do with
it?”

“Trinity, and I don’t know why I’m concocting a new
religion. Although I have to say, with few exceptions, none of the religions
I’ve bumped into have been particularly likeable. But I’m drawn to religion,
even as I am repelled by it. It fascinates me. And maybe it was reading about
ISIS that made me want to start my own religion….”

“Those people are evil,” said Lady, with the same certainty
she had about Hitler.

“And the Crusaders who invaded the Holy Land? Were they evil
too?”

“Very likely…”

“Well, they didn’t think so, nor do the ISIS people, who
have now come to believe that some guy named Baghdadi
has just become the eighth Caliph, and that completely changes the game, because
now we have a caliphate, which is a territory ruled by a theology, and there
are absolutely no nations, no borders. So throw out that idea that ruled
Western civilization for half a millennium or more! Oh, and since we now have a
caliphate, the rules get changed, and we gotta play hard by the Koran and go
right back to all the really nasty stuff, which is why gay people are getting
thrown off roofs, and anybody not believing in the Caliph—including the
Shiites, of whom there are maybe 200 million or so in the world—has to be
slaughtered. OK—except for the women; they get to be sex slaves.”

“But aren’t the Shiites Muslim, too?”

“Wrong kind. Bam—gotta go!”

“Sick.”

“But fascinating. There are people who are highly educated,
deeply intelligent, and they will tell you that they are absolutely certain
that the little sliver of bread they ate and the slug of cheap wine they drank
became the actual flesh and blood of Christ. Nope—not a metaphor, but the real
flesh and blood of a guy who died 2000 years ago, which if true, would
definitely call for a inspection from the USDA….”

Lady’s poetic mind freezes at the idea.

“So shouldn’t we just try to lead good lives, and hope for
the best?”

“Who could dispute that? But there’s so much good that
religion gives us…”

“Like?”

Well, consider the man who wrote the cantata Warum betrübst du
dich, mein Herz? Yup, J. S. Bach, and if he didn’t sail into
heaven, I’m gonna have some serious stuff to say to St. Peter.”

Life, Death and Iguanas

Life, Death…and Iguanas?Yes, that’s the title of an e-book available on Amazon / Kindle. It’s the story of a woman who took charge of her death, just as she had her life. Of a family that split, and then united. Of a man who decided to live. Oh, and there’s some great stuff about iguanas….Read the first chapter by clicking here!